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Top 5 Horror Animes

Who doesn’t like a good scare? (A lot of people, actually, but really those people are missing out). Everybody knows that Japan comes up with the creepiest shit ever. Hollywood definitely knows this and that is why nearly all the good horror movies are remakes of even more horrifying Japanese movies. (I’m talking about Grudge and Ring here). So obviously Japan will incorporate this creepiness into their anime and add effects that will make everything 10x more horrifying. So after careful (lol) research I present to you Top 5 Horror Animes. (Please note that this is a very subjective list and also, that I didn’t incorporate animes like Attack on Titan/ Shingeki no Kyojin, Tokyo Ghoul, Elfen Lied etc because they aren’t solely horror and didn’t actually fit in with the theme I was going for).

1. Ghosts at School

To be honest, I watched this anime when I was 12 years old, and at that point it seemed like the coolest/creepiest show ever. It follows the story of Satsuki Miyanoshita, who moves in with her family to the hometown of her deceased mother. After enrolling into her mother’s Middle School, she finds out that her mother was a sort-of “Ghost Hunter” and had sealed many ghosts in and around the town. Due to urbanization, the ghosts are released and it’s up to Satsuki surprise surprise to re-seal all the ghosts. It’s not exactly horrifying really but it has its creepy moments.

Good luck finding the original version, though. The ADV dub is the only version I could find and the dubbing company made some weird character changes. Like, seriously weird changes. They make one of the characters an Evangelist. It doesn’t make sense and it didn’t even add to the plot of the story. It’s just a random, meaningless character change. This is as bad as the One Piece 4Kids dub.

2. Corpse Party: Tortured Souls

It has all the elements of a really scary anime. Gore, alternate ghost dimension, creepy as hell kids, and gore. Based on a game of the same name, it follows the story of a bunch of High Schoolers who are transported to an Elementary School after they play a game of “Sachiko Ever After”. The Elementary School is apparently the school over which their High School was built and was shut down after the grisly murders of some of the staff and students. The ghost, Sachiko, is a creepy little girl in a red dress who goes around killing people in gruesome ways like plucking out various organs with a pair of scissors. The other creepy little kids who were murdered by Sachiko do her bidding and kill the High Schoolers off one by one.

3. Another

This anime has one of the best horror plots I have ever seen. Yomiyama Middle School Class 3-3 is cursed. In 1972, a student of this class, Misaki, tragically passed away in the middle of the school year. The other classmates, devastated by the death, pretend that Misaki never died and this all culminated in Misaki showing up in the Graduation photo. Ever since then, every batch that studies in Class 3-3 ends up having an ‘extra’ student who isn’t supposed to be there. And that ‘extra’ student (who is basically a dead student who doesn’t know that he/she is dead) ends up inviting death to the class. In order to counter this, they pick one member of a class and ostracize them so that the number of students add up. But then the protagonist, Kōichi Sakakibara comes and screws shit up. Sinister music, creepy dolls and beautiful art makes this a really good horror anime to watch.

4. Hell Girl

It focuses on the existence of a “Hell Correspondence” that allows people to take revenge by having other people sent to Hell via the services of the mysterious titular character and her assistants who implement this system. Each episode is basically a self-contained short story of where a person has been suffering torment from an acquaintance to the point that he or she accesses the Hell Correspondence website and submits a request to get rid of the person. Ai Enma, the Hell Girl, appears, and presents a doll with a string that can send the named antagonist to Hell. When the string is pulled, Enma and her companions then torment the antagonist, offering a last chance to repent (which is usually refused), and ferries them to Hell. The price of the contract is that the person making the request will also have to go to Hell after his or her life is over. Though it might have a running background story, the basic premise remains the same and focuses on Ai Enma’s job of taking the damned to hell. Dark themes of hatred, vengeance, anger and jealousy run throughout the show and it beautifully and very eerily depicts complex human emotions.

5. Yami Shibai

The show starts off with an old man showing up at a children’s playground and telling them ghost stories based on myths and urban legends of Japanese origin. The man tells the stories on the back of his bicycle using a traditional kamishibai (Paper Drama) method and features a new tale each week. Each episode is about 5 minutes long and depicts various stories in very creepy animation. Since each episode is a different story which have absolutely no connection with each other. I really can’t go into the specifics. There are some stories that are just plain weird and some stories that are freaky as hell. The animation and sound effects just add to the over-all creepiness of the show and, honestly, there isn’t much more I can say about this show. It’s like 5 minutes long. Just watch it.